le are the same
about pictures. They can go into a picture gallery--Miss Conder can--and
say straight off what they feel, all round the wall. I never could do
that. But music is so different from pictures, to my mind. When it comes
to music I am as safe as houses, and I assure you, Tibby, I am by no
means pleased by everything. There was a thing--something about a faun
in French--which Helen went into ecstasies over, but I thought it most
tinkling and superficial, and said so, and I held to my opinion too."

"Do you agree?" asked Margaret. "Do you think music is so different from
pictures?"

"I--I should have thought so, kind of," he said.

"So should I. Now, my sister declares they're just the same. We have
great arguments over it. She says I'm dense; I say she's sloppy."
Getting under way, she cried: "Now, doesn't it seem absurd to you? What
is the good of the Arts if they 're interchangeable? What is the good
of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye? Helen's one aim is to
translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the
language of music. It's very ingenious, and she says several pretty
things in the process, but what's gained, I'd like to know? Oh, it's
all rubbish, radically false. If Monet's really Debussy, and Debussy's
really Monet, neither gentleman is worth his salt--that's my opinion."

Evidently these sisters quarrelled.

"Now, this very symphony that we've just been having--she won't let it
alone. She labels it with meanings from start to finish; turns it into
literature. I wonder if the day will ever return when music will be
treated as music. Yet I don't know. There's my brother--behind us. He
treats music as music, and oh, my goodness! He makes me angrier than any
one, simply furious. With him I daren't even argue."

An unhappy family, if talented.

"But, of course, the real villain is Wagner. He has done more than any
man in the nineteenth century towards the muddling of the arts. I
do feel that music is in a very serious state just now, though
extraordinarily interesting. Every now and then in history there do
come these terrible geniuses, like Wagner, who stir up all the wells of
thought at once. For a moment it's splendid. Such a splash as never
was. But afterwards--such a lot of mud; and the wells--as it were, they
communicate with each other too easily now, and not one of them will run
quite clear. That's what Wagner's done."

Her speeches fluttered away from the